Q&A: Sportradar on the welcome return of top-flight football action

The Bundesliga will become the world’s first major professional football league to return to action during the coronavirus pandemic.

The German top flight will restart on Saturday 16 May to provide a welcome and timely boost to sports betting operators, which have endured a dearth of top-tier action since Covid-19 began.

The fixture list – which stretches into Sunday evening when Bayern Munich face Union Berlin – will also delight punters, who have been trying to fill the void with Belarusian football and table tennis.

How many days until the Bundesliga returns? pic.twitter.com/2aKQcwssKI

— GOAL (@goal) May 15, 2020

The authorities have put together an extensive plan to protect teams and players which will surely be used as a blueprint throughout the rest of Europe should it prove to be a success.

There has already been one hiccup, however. Augsburg head coach Heiko Herrlich will miss the comeback after breaking quarantine rules by leaving the team hotel to buy toothpaste.

While teams have been preparing in quarantine, data provider Sportradar has been busy behind-the-scenes to ensure a smooth transition for its clients.

Below, Munich-based Sportradar audiovisual MD Lukas Seiler revels in the return.

EGR Intel: What will the return of a top-level league mean for the sports betting industry?

Lukas Seiler: Firstly, it gives us that light at the end of the tunnel and hope for us all going back to a more normal life with professional sports gradually coming back across the globe. What these guys [the Bundesliga] have done over the last couple of weeks is phenomenal. They have been working on a concept to meet the necessary health and safety requirements, not only for the players and the clubs, but also for the other parties involved in producing the motion pictures. It wasn’t easy to find a common basis or a minimum viable situation that works, but it has now been approved by the authorities.

EGR Intel: Are you confident other leagues will look to follow the example set by the Bundesliga?

LS: As we’ve learned over the last couple of days, the concept provided by the Bundesliga has been shared with numerous other professional sports leagues across the globe. They have clearly engaged very intensely with the bigger European soccer leagues, but also beyond. Everybody is now looking very closely at what will happen. Korea came back about a week ago, which was already a big bang for Asia, but also for the rest of the world because it shows something like this is possible. The Bundesliga is the next step up as one of the top three soccer leagues. It provides a blueprint and if it’s sustainable, then it will really lead by example.

EGR Intel: The Bundesliga has confirmed no more than 322 people will be allowed in each stadium during a match. Does this include data scouts?

LS: You want to limit the number of human beings on site and everybody must play their part. Our own scouts collecting data on the ground is not an absolute necessity, because there are other very reliable and minimal latency sources available and provided by the league to make sure we can deliver the same quality and speed of data.

Lukas Seiler, audiovisual MD, Sportradar

EGR Intel: How has Sportradar been working with the Bundesliga in the build-up to its return?

LS: We’ve just been preparing along the lines of what the league has guided us to do. We are a paying client and are commercially supportive as we always have been. We’ve been working with the Bundesliga since 2006  and it was one of the first relevant sports leagues to be penetrated in the betting space as video, as the first big streaming piece in the market.

EGR Intel: Rumours surfaced about Premier League players being told to turn their faces away during a tackle, but surely harm minimisation can only be applied before and after the whistle is blown?

LS: I fully agree. We must do everything we can off the pitch to make sure that we have perfect pre-conditions. Everything that can be done will be done, up until the point the players are on the pitch. Then it needs to be as normal as it possibly can be. Ideally, we wouldn’t have people shouting in each other’s’ faces, but it is soccer. It’s a physical sport and there will be contact.

It's officially official! The @Bundesliga_EN returns May 16.

Let the title race resume 🏃🏁 pic.twitter.com/LvaelvvTDy

— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) May 7, 2020

EGR Intel: Did you have to do anything behind-the-scenes to gear up for the return of top-tier sport?

LS: There was not much that we really had to do. We faced this promptly because it was clear that from one day to the next sport was gone. What we had to do at that point was prep up and make sure our clients still had an offering for their customers. We tried to deliver as much as we could of sensible content, not senseless content. We’ve heard of some very strange things being offered and we have tried to stay clear of that to provide safeguarded, protected content to our partners. We always knew that we had to be prepared to play things out as soon as they came back, so we were ready to reboot and restart from day one.

EGR Intel: Punters have had a handful of events to bet on during lockdown, including the NFL Draft and the Virtual Grand National, but they must be relishing the return of real sport?

LS: Yes. This is revenue-generating content and there is a different level of attention you can draw with an event of this significance. It is far easier for an operator to draw attention with an event that is familiar to everyone and interests a broader range of people. It’s much more difficult to do this with lower-tier competitions or side events.